Dateline: NEW YORK—A cabal of Wall Street bankers runs a global crime syndicate that buys the regulators of their industry, rigs the rules of the market, and uses convoluted financial instruments and bogus mathematical models to siphon cash from the majority of people in modern economies, according to many experts.

However, no judge or jury has convicted the bankers of any crime, because no one other than the bankers understands exactly how they’re doing what they’re doing.

“That’s all going to change,” said Laura Lickspittle, head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which is supposed to regulate the black hole that is the financial securities industry.

“As our critics point out, the SEC has resorted to employing a workforce of hundreds of trained monkeys instead of people, because of budget cuts and a lack of political will to learn about the nature of global financial fraud. As you can probably tell from my fur, I myself am merely a monkey.

“But we begged Washington for assistance. ‘Mr. President,’ I told him, ‘you know, we’re just a lot of shrieking monkeys over here compared to the diabolical masterminds we’re up against. We need help.’”

Help came in the form of aliens from another planet. “I had this ace in my back pocket,” said the president. “We’d made secret contact with the Poindexters years ago. Now we’ve asked them to prosecute the Wall Street bankers and they’ve agreed.”

The Poindexters are an advanced extraterrestrial species specializing in the science that sustains a number of intergalactic empires. “We conquer planets before breakfast,” said the top Poindexter adjudicator, upon the alien race’s arrival on Earth. “So we think we can figure out what your bankers are doing to you.”

The trial lasted several weeks, during which time the Poindexter attorneys struggled to explain the alleged financial crimes to a jury and to counter the Wall Street lawyers’ obfuscations. The prosecutors’ efforts were hampered by the jury’s inability to stay awake for much of the trial.

In the end, when the jury voted to acquit on all charges, the Poindexters conceded defeat. “We tried to untangle the bankers’ sinister schemes. We really did. But these guys are friggin criminal geniuses. I mean, come on! In fact, we’d like to take them off your hands for you. We could use their weapons of mass economic destruction—however the hell those weapons work.”

The bankers refused to leave Earth, which led the president to invoke Plan B. “I’m shooting for the fences on this one,” he said. “I happen to have a second back channel. This time, I’m calling on God.”

With transcendent splendor, the creator of the universe materialized in front of the White House. His voice boomed as he declared, “I’m not supposed to be judging anyone yet, but I’ve had a look at the evidence. As to how the bankers’ financial instruments work, I’m stumped. I don’t have the foggiest idea what those wonks are up to—and I design universes for a living, so this doesn’t sit well with me.”

Ben Cain is a misanthropic omega male who likes to think that the more you suffer, the funnier you can be, and the more of an alienated loser you are, the more you can withstand coming face to face with the horrors of reality. He dedicated himself to discovering whether suffering has a meaning and so he earned a meaningless Ph.D. in analytic philosophy. He shares his findings by writing philosophical rants on his blog, Rants within the Undead God, and he's published a novel, called God Decays, which is available on Amazon. Also, he's pretentiously written this bio in the third person even though he rarely partakes of such conventional trickery.

Oh, thanks very much. It helps that I’ve spent the last few years on my blog working out a pretty complex worldview, and that I wrote all those articles in a philosophical rant format rather than a dry academic one. I write from an established moral center, as they say.